Timeline Facts and Questions

One of the more interesting mysteries about the Harry Potter universe is when
the stories in the books take place. There have been a lot of discussions and
debates about this subject and some fans have done
amazingly detailed research trying to
determine the years involved. This page presents some of the intriguing
timeline-related details in the books.

The Deathday Cake

This party was to celebrate Nick's
five-hundredth Deathday, which means the 500th anniversary of his death. Add
five hundred years to 1492
and you get 1992
[Y12], so the party, which took place
on Hallowe'en night, took place in the fall of
1992
[Y12]. This reference is the only direct
date given for an event in the
Harry Potter books. It is from
this single note that all the rest of the timelines of the books have been
derived.

The Official Timeline

Yes, there is one. According to sources at Warner Bros. who worked on the
DVD of
Chamber of Secrets,
here's what happened. The folks at Warner came up with a timeline. There is
pretty strong evidence that the timeline they came up with was from the
Lexicon--the master timeline and
the day-by-day calendars of the
first two books. They showed this timeline to Rowling. She looked it over
and made one or two comments or little changes, then approved it.

That timeline now appears on the DVD of
Chamber of Secrets.
You can't get to it on your television; you need to put the second DVD in a
computer's DVD drive. Since it was approved by Rowling, it is considered to
be official. Some folks don't consider anything to be canon except the
novels themselves, so they
do not consider this timeline to be the final answer. As far as the Lexicon
goes, since Rowling approved it (and not without making corrections, which
suggests that she made sure it was accurate), that timeline is canon.

How do I (Steve Vander Ark)
know that they borrowed the timeline from the Lexicon? Because
I had made a tiny, stupid little typo on my
day-by-day calendar of the
first book. I had accidentally put the first visit of
Harry and
Ron to
Hagrid's cabin on
Saturday instead of Friday. I did that because I write Monday-through-Friday
schedules all the time as part of my job, filling information onto
week grids. The last square of the calendar I work on usually is Friday, so
I put the visit to
Hagrid's cabin in the
last square without thinking. That typo is reproduced in the
"official" timeline on the DVD.

There are a few characters from history in the series, but most of them
are long-deceased and any dates associated with them are mentioned only on
their Chocolate Frog
Famous Wizard Cards. These give us no clues about the dates of
current events. However, one "live" character,
Nicolas Flamel, is
mentioned along with his age. Since
Nicolas was a
real person, and since the actual date of his birth is known, we can derive
the date of the book where he is mentioned.

The real Flamel
was born, according to most reports, in
1330, and in the
first book he is mentioned
as having "turned 665 last year." Add 666 to
1330 and you get 1996.
Using Flamel as a
reference point, then, dates the first book to 1995 or 1996.

While this seems pretty cut and dried, this date doesn't agree with the
date given on the Deathday Party cake. They
can't both be right, and in this case, the
Flamel reference is
the less clear of the two. It assumes that the
Flamel of the
Harry Potter universe is in every way identical to the one in real history.
Given the way the rest of the books are written, this might be
an unwarranted assumption.

Rowling has borrowed from numerous sources for her books and has altered
the facts in many cases to fit the story. One particularly good example of
this is the fact that Lupin the
werewolf didn't transform into
a wolf until the moon came out from behind a cloud. According to the real
lycanthropy legends, Lupin would have
transformed simply because it was the full moon, whether or not he actually
stepped into moonlight. Another example is the
Boggart as described by
Rowling, which bears only slight resemblence to the
Boggart of folklore. It
is very possible that she changed
Flamel's birth year
for her stories as well.

In GF2,
Harry tells
Sirius that his cousin threw his
Playstation out the window. Sony released the first Playstation in December
of 1994, and that was in
Japan. If we
accept the timeline derived from the
Deathday Party cake,
Harry is telling
Sirius about this incident in August
of 1994
[Y14], nearly a half-year earlier. Is it
impossible, then, for Dudley to have
a Playstation if we accept that timeline?

There are two ways to answer that question. One way to look at it is that
this isn't our reality, so the Playstation could have been released whenever
Rowling wanted it to be. You could say that since
Dudley obviously did have a
Playstation in July, 1994
[Y14], the Playstation must
have been released earlier than December of
1994 in Rowling's invented
reality.

The other way of looking at it assumes that the dates of the Playstation's
release was in fact December of
1994 in the Potter universe,
since that's what it was in ours. Then is it still possible for
Dudley to have one? The answer to
that, actually, is yes. Here's what Shaun Hately wrote in
HPfGU:

The Playstation was first available for regular import into the
UK in around December
1994 - exact date is hard to
pin down. Limited numbers of machines were certainly being imported for
games development purposes before June
1994 - I've no idea how much
before - and some of these did get into the hands of private citizens if
they were willing to pay the money.

That comes from looking through old messages from a computer and video games
e-mail list I was on at the time, which had a significant
UK membership. I had to search for the disks I had
messages archived on (and now I have a huge desire to replay
Eye of the Beholder).

Another bit of modern technology which exists in the
Dursley home is a
"wide-screen television." It's in the kitchen, of all places. I
don't know when wide screen televisions became available, but it doesn't
seem like it was that many years ago. Perhaps this wide-screen refers only to
a particularly large set, what we in the US might call a
"big-screen TV," not a true wide-screen.

The Date on the Prophecy

There are a couple of places in
book five where Rowling
could have easily settled this whole date matter once and for all.
Unfortunately she chose not to do so. One of the best examples is the date
which was on the little card by Harry's
prophecy.
Instead of just giving the date, Rowling writes that the date was
"sixteen years earlier." Why didn't she write
"1980"?

I have to admit that I wish she had. She has gone out of her way to address
other fan questions, like the pronunciation of
Hermione's name (with
Krum at the
Yule Ball) and why
Hermione wasn't sorted into
Ravenclaw.
The fact that she intentionally doesn't answer this question suggests that
she doesn't want the stories to be too obviously tied to a particular range
of years. The connection is there, certainly, but she doesn't want to just
come out and state it. Most people just sort of assume that the books are
taking place "now" and don't really care how specific that
"now" is. It seems likely that she doesn't want to put anything in
which would make the stories become dated.

The Drought of 1995

As the first chapter of book five
begins, there is a drought in
Surrey that has
prompted a hosepipe
ban. This book, according to the now-approved timeline which appears on
the Chamber of Secrets DVD, begins in 1995. Sure enough, the summer of
1995 was extremely dry in England:

1995 and 1996 were the two driest consecutive years for over 200 years.

Despite the experiences of 1975 water authorities were still unprepared
for the hot dry summer of 1995. By August many rivers were flowing at less
than half their average for the time of year. Low water levels meant less
water could be extracted by water companies and so there was less water
to dilute pollutants.

Days and Dates

A number of dates are given along with a day of the week on which they
fell. None of these make any sense whatsoever. Some of them are flatly
impossible, as a matter of fact. For example,
Harry was brought to the
Dursleys' front porch
at about midnight at the end of a Tuesday
(PS1). We know that this
Tuesday was the first of November, since
Harry's parents had been killed the
night before and that was October 31, so November 1 was a Tuesday. Ten years
later, the day before
Harry's birthday was a Monday,
according to PS3, which
means that his birthday, July 31, was a Tuesday. Now there is no way that
those two days can both be Tuesdays using our calendar.
It isn't mathematically possible.

This same problem turns of in an even more obvious way in
early editions of
Goblet of Fire, when both September 1 and September 2 are Mondays!
(However, that was corrected officially in later editions, and cannot be
used to support timeline arguments any longer.) As if that weren't enough,
September 2 of the next year, in
Order of the Phoenix, is
also a Monday! There are other examples as well.

How do we make sense of this? There is no way we can if we're hoping
to somehow fit all the days and dates given to any of our calendar years.
They simply won't fit. Rowling seems to be making a point that the
wizarding world, the world of her stories,
is not real. She's making it very clear that the stories aren't taking place
in our reality, in our time, in our space.
The exact dates just aren't important.

So then why do we go to all the
trouble of trying to figure out what year things are happening in?

This is a very important question. From some of the points raised on
this page, it would almost seem like Rowling doesn't want the range of
years to be figured out. I don't think that's the case. Rowling's invented
universe is simply filled with dates, from the years that
Dilys Derwent was
headmistress of Hogwarts to
the year Dumbledore defeated
Grindelwald. If one
accepts the Famous Wizard
cards and the school books
as canon, a huge sweeping history can be detailed, starting from the
founding of Hogwarts
a millenium ago. It's only the events of the novels themselves which are
left dateless, but with plenty of clues. Rowling has inextricably tied
her stories to historical events, events with real, stated dates.

So while she doesn't want to come straight out and say the dates of
the books to maintain the comfortable-ness of "now," she does offer us
enough clues so that if we want to, we can figure out when the stories
are taking place. That's what we've done.